The blog of author Dennis Cooper

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, I should have seen that coming, but I didn’t. Touche! ** Damien Ark, Hi. Well, in fact, I already have that album, and like it very much. I’ve been a fan of Carl Stone’s stuff for ages. Awesome you like it too. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Silverblatt’s the best. Best literary reader/talker in the USA. It rained like the demons this morning, and it’s 19 degrees here as I type! No similar big-up from the powers that be regarding the web stuff, unfortunately. I met Fran Leibowitz a couple of times years ago. She’s really fantastic. Her few books are a super treat. ** Bill, Hey. It’s 64 motherfucking degrees F here! Yes! That’s extremely happy making news that you’re making your sketch creep along. Happy to guilt-trip the hell out of you if it’ll help, and I’m allergic to guilt-tripping, so that’s a rare imparting offer. ** Jamie, Hey Jamie! You’re back! Oh no, so sorry to hear your health didn’t have as good a time on holidays as you did. You sound pretty good, so I hope you’ve upswung. Sweet, thanks about the Scents post. It was fun/weird to make given my know-nothingness about the topic. I do think we underrate smell’s thing. It’s weird how we applaud our eyesight and hearing but our noses get treated like a given. I might be just talking about myself. Yeah, no doubt. The heatwave’s history, at least for a few days, and I feel springy. Springy like a coil, not like the season. I’ve been working pretty much. New film (proposal stuff, script polishing) and, yes, TV (writing up our proposed changes and trying to justify what we want to do in a schmoozey doc for ARTE). Yes, I’m extremely excited about the big PGL event in NYC. Really excited. We’re trying to work out a London PGL screening for September, but, at the moment, it doesn’t look all that likely. Maybe, though. For later, for sure, but we were hoping to debut it there that soon. I didn’t know who Jose Mourinho is, naturally, but now I superficially do thanks to google. Awesome that you’re writing that little play. I hope a spontaneous standing ovation is in its offing. I hope your Thursday de-pits every prune that is placed on your plate forever. Listening to Ravi Shankar on acid love, Dennis. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I know when we shoot in people’s places, we just take pix of everything and then exactly match the pix when we restore the place. Pretty efficient. We basically had to do that (buy the props ourselves) when we shot LCTG. Now we have all this stuff we never needed. Hopefully the Smithsonian will take it off our hands someday. I just got ‘Astroworld’ yesterday, but I haven’t ‘cracked’ it yet. Very curious about it. ** _Black_Acrylic, I featured that book before in the dead place? Oops. Or not oops, I guess. Nice both about the order and the happy news that the school is still there and optimistic enough to order things. ** James Nulick, Hi, James. People used to do that here, and I was similarly, like, whatever, but now when Paris gets a heatwave, it’s the full-blown thing. Writing is going okay, even if it’s just (and a shit-ton of) proposal and explanatory texts right now and not very much involving anything too fun. The new film script is ‘this close’ to being finished, and I’m as excited/happy as punch about it. Wow, your new novel might be ready by October? That’s coolness, Good old deadlines. They do have their value. Me too about lots of Aphex Twin on vinyl back in LA, but … not sure if I have that one. Nest egg. Nope, your comment arrived in a single form in a totally normal way. I so wish that your Thursday wish for me were plausible, my friend. May yours de-age everyone with good politics. Love, me. ** Misanthrope, Only vaguely apropos, what you wrote made me wonder what that saying ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’ means and where it comes from. I guess it’s an anti-math thing? Yes, I think so too about a French boy band. Maybe I should mastermind one and get in the history books and make a fortune. Or maybe Zac and I should make a film about a French boy band. Hm, not such a horrible idea. I’ll run it by the Z. Jesus. I mean, what do I know — nothing if you’re actually wondering — but logic says it’s that thing they put in your stomach, no? They want you to take a Hep C test? That seems weird. Are you sure your doctor isn’t Sasha Cohen? Man, seriously though, very, very, very best of luck with that stuff, and let me know what’s going on. ** JM, Hi. Interesting to learn which of my recommended books you’ve bookmarked. If I were into psychology, and I’m not, I bet I would have just learned something important about you. The only Stephen King books I’ve read are ‘Cujo’ and … another one, I forget. I can’t take his prose. It’s just too workmanlike with self-conscious quirkiness for me. But, boy, he’s a bit of a genius with plots and cool ideas and stuff. We’re back to good weather again here, for today at least. Interesting about that meeting and the one today and their connections and disparities. Whoa, you will learn something important about him if he accepts that safe word. If he does accepts it, watch out. Or enjoy! I hope your palm has gotten all gushy in the right places again. ** Right. Gosh, today’s post is just the most self-explanatory post ever, so I’ll leave you to it. See you tomorrow.

Hey Dennis, you spin me right round. I feel like I’ve used that gag in here before…
Nice stack, with a more precision, machine-like feel than I felt like there was going to be at the beginning. Records are such a cool music device, with 45s being the coolest in my book. I remember having a record come free with a breakfast cereal and you just had to take scissors to the cereal box and cut the disc out. I think mine was De La Soul’s Magic Number. I loved it, even with its crappy quality. I felt quite childish for giggling at the person taking the line of whatever from a spinning disc, but was also quite impressed with the lightness of touch that must be required to get that note or tube just above the spinning substance without stopping the turntable. Ah drugs.
How was your Thursday? Mine came with a total health upswing making me feel like a different person than I have for the past few days. It’s delicious. Hannah and I got free tickets for the Men’s Artistic Gymnastics, which is on in Glasgow as part of the European Championships, so we went to that this afternoon. As someone who’s never been to any sporting events before before, except for one lousy football game, I thought it was totally brilliant. A mad, brightly coloured spectacle with people performing the most bizarre physical feats. Plus a fairly saccharine modern pop soundtrack that at one point segued into the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey. Must have been the Scottish connection.
So, how’s Friday looking for you?
May it score maximum points on your joy-o-meter.
Barely legal love,
Jamie

Speaking of Smithsonian, the library of the Smithsonian Folkways label was just added to Bandcamp, and I was amused to see that it includes a spoken word album by Bernie Sanders about Eugene Debs originally released in 1979 (along with Shirley Collins’ 1959 debut album and an album made this year by an Iraqi-American oud player.)

Your Day is just in time for the Guardian’s article 2 days ago about how CDs are at the very early stage of becoming hip the way vinyl is now. I plan to go thrift shopping for $2 used CDs on Saturday.

I saw RaMell Ross’ experimental documentary HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING and liked it a lot. It takes as much from the avant-garde tradition as a conventional documentary one, and while it includes aspects of African-American life that both black and white spectators might expect to see – church, basketball games and practice (Ross moved to Alabama in part to work as a basketball coach), discussions of police violence – it constantly defies cliches and expectations: there’s a scene where one of its subjects is pulled over by a cop, but it immediately cuts to a long shot where a goat standing in the road is far more visible than any of the people. I’ll be interviewing Ross in the last week of this month, and it should be very interesting. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny Glover and Laura Poitras all had a hand in getting this film made. There’s also an excellent ambient drone score by three composers; until Ross plays a Billie Holiday song over the credits, he avoids obvious “black music” unless his subjects are listening to it onscreen.

LP,sEP,s45,s // like a gif story without the story part or really the gif part, pure representation and delicious. I can understand seeing StephenK as a workman; I think it’s related to the name Steph/ven because Soderbergh has the same thing going for him. Palms all gushy and safewords confirmed in an hour. We have a Vinyl shop in CHCH that would gut this post from the outset simply by being about the act of rotation or action of the vinyl as opposed to the product. their loss. hope your day is less about the product than the getting there 🙂

Did you know that Pere Ubu’s original synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine released a solo album this year? It’s available on Bandcamp from the Morphius label, who have also done reissues from This Heat, Faust, Fred Frith, Pere Ubu itself and other worthwhile art-rockers.

Hey now here’s a post that speaks my language. The vinyl record is quite obviously the single most perfectly formed man made invention ever created and even after any Nuclear Holoicaust, there’ll no doubt still be stacks of LPs surviving. I do find some comfort in this.

The most recent record I bought was last week, a bootleg of the 1976 Moog LP Mort Garson – Plantasia. It’s a curiousity that’s been rediscovered – the original was given away free with plant food but now commands prohibitively high prices on Discogs. I used to DJ the digital file at Yuck ‘n Yum launches back in the day and it’s good to have as a physical object, a tangible thing I can touch.

Dennis, Weirdly, I think there are times when two wrongs do make a right. Rare circumstances, of course, but sometimes…yeah.

I remember thinking how cool Elvis’ Moody Blue LP was because it was blue. He had another that was purple. I think Ace Frehley’s solo album was blue too, if I remember correctly. I might be wrong there. My toddler-hood was spent running around our apartment in Suitland, MD listening to my mom’s Elvis 45s.

I think this mesh thing in my stomach could be it. Pain every day from that, particularly after I eat. A small blockage could cause those results. I guess they have to test for Hep to get that out of the way. Ain’t no way I got some Hep C.

Thanks for the good wishes. I don’t have to fast for the test, either, so that’s good. Because I’m eating some birthday cake Friday evening, which is the 47th anniversary of my not so gracefully gracing the world stage. Ugh, 47. But you know what? Onward and upward, I say! I love my 40s!

I’m finally at the second half of my novel. It will come around but it’ll take longer than the first half. Glad, though, that there’s been pretty steady progress.

You’re on a roll with these posts that are only possible with GIFs. I’m as enthused as any sensitive 28 year old about analog music and cinema, but not when work that was produced in an analog format is presented in a digital format or vice versa. This hangup severely limits my options for revival house movies and for purchasing objects (I won’t buy CD’s either–they somehow seem even more scratch-prone than records and feel hopelessly middlebrow) rather than strings of 1’s and 0’s from my favorite musicians.

I’m weirdly anxious about returning to USA for a visit even though I’ll almost definitely have fun visiting people and attending a wedding. Aside from people I care about, it feels like there’s not much there for me there besides phantoms of a past or a might-have-been life. Of course there are fun places to pass time, and like many Israelis I’ll do a lot of shopping there because things are so expensive here. Whenever I go with my boyfriend it’ll be fun to see the place through his eyes, but he couldn’t make it on this trip (probably for the best, since I think the whole meet-the-parents thing will play out better here then it would’ve there). I guess this is a sign that my move has been a success?

How do you feel going back there? What was it like going back for the first time after Amsterdam and then after Paris?